In other words, digital scholarship may have greater impact if it takes fuller advantage of the digital medium and innovates more aggressively. Digital books and digital articles that mimic their print counterparts may be efficient, but they do not expand our imagination of what scholarship could be in an era of boundlessness, an era of ubiquity. They do not imagine other forms in which scholarship might live in a time when our audiences can be far more vast and varied than in previous generations. They do not challenge us to think about keeping alive the best traditions of the academy by adapting those traditions to the possibilities of our own time. They do not encourage new kinds of writing, of seeing, of explaining. And we need all those things.

The Digital Scholarship Lab atlas will be a part of what we call generative scholarship—scholarship that builds ongoing, ever-growing digital environments even as it is used. Generative scholarship is framed with significant disciplinary questions in mind, offers scholarly interpretation in multiple forms as it is being built, and invites collaborators ranging from undergraduate students to senior researchers to public historians.

To understand this situation, we need to step back for a moment to take a broader view of the scholarly enterprise. At its essence, the modern system of scholarship, regardless of discipline, is built around specialized contributions to scholarly conversations and debates. All forms of research and writing—books, journal articles, research papers, pre-prints, reviews—in all disciplines are fractals of this monographic orientation, fragments replicating the structures of the whole